A Boy of Seventeen at the Head of His People: Orson Kimball Whitney of the Vanguard Company (1847)

Orson Kimball Whitney was born in 1830 in Kirtland, Ohio, in the first hour of the Restoration — the son of Newel K. Whitney, the merchant-bishop whose Kirtland store the Lord had claimed by revelation, and Elizabeth Ann Smith Whitney, one of the first women of the Church. He grew up moving with the Saints from Kirtland to Missouri to Nauvoo, a child of every persecution his parents endured, and was endowed in the Nauvoo Temple as a teenager in the final days before the exodus.

In the spring of 1847, at seventeen, Orson was asked to join Brigham Young's Vanguard Company — one of the very youngest members of the historic band. He traveled in the Tenth Ten under Captain Appleton M. Harmon, in the same ten as his older brother Horace, the diarist. The two Whitney boys — Bishop Whitney's eldest sons — drove their wagons at the front of the migration, while their father, in failing health, waited at Winter Quarters with their mother. Newel K. Whitney would never make the trip west: he died at Salt Lake City in September 1850, having crossed at last to join the sons who had opened the way for him.

Orson helped build the first fort at Salt Lake City, returned east for the family, and spent the remainder of his short life in the valley the company had found. He died in 1884, at about fifty-four — the year his brother Horace also died. Their names were carried forward in the next generation: Horace's son Orson F. Whitney, the future apostle and Church historian, "was named for his uncle, Orson K. Whitney, another pioneer."

The record of the first company remembers Orson as what he was: a Kirtland-born boy of seventeen who walked a thousand miles at the head of his people and grew old in the city he helped found — one of the youngest of the 143 men who blazed the trail, whose whole life from birth to grave was contained within the gathered Church.

Fuller account of this event (the complete account as preserved in Through Memory's Halls: The Life Story of Orson F. Whitney as Told by Himself, Orson F. Whitney):

On the Missouri River Horace K. Whitney and his younger brother Orson were enrolled in the Pioneer Company led by President Brigham Young to the Rocky Mountains, entering Salt Lake Valley, July 24, 1847.